A Kugel to Savor for Rosh Hashana

This savory kugel is from my 102-year-old mother, Pearl, who in 1950 put the recipe in a spiral-bound cookbook to raise money for her temple. Rather than raisins and sugar, it calls for onions and garlic, with what were then considered secret ingredients, Worcestershire and Tabasco.

I loved this kugel as a child. I remember it being served occasionally to break the fast on Yom Kippur, but we never ate it to celebrate Rosh Hashana, which this year begins on Sept. 13.

Over the summer, I baked the kugel for my family, especially for my mother. One taste brought back memories. Her cookbook, “Regard Thy Table,” had cost 50 cents a copy to produce, she told me, and the ladies at her temple in Larchmont, N.Y., sold them for $1. They called the kugel Exciting Baked Noodles.

But I suspect the original recipe was called Noodles Romanoff and came from the makers of that Worcestershire sauce. At the Johnson & Wales Culinary Arts Museum in Providence, R.I., I found the recipe in a Lea & Perrins booklet titled “Dishes Men Like.”

With a title like that, tips like this one are perhaps not so surprising: “If you have a husband who likes to cook, pamper him. You are lucky indeed, even though you find yourself only a fetch-and-carry handmaiden while his genius glows.”

Kugel originated in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France and the Rhineland of Germany as a casserole made from stale bread or leftover noodles dunked in water and eggs and baked in a shallow terra cotta dish. As it traveled to this country, kugel became sweeter and richer, sometimes incorporating even ingredients like Dole pineapple rings and Frosted Flakes.

But in my family, the savory salt-and-pepper kugel was always preferred.

I recently met another like-minded kugel lover. Charles Silberstein grew up on Staten Island in the 1950s and ’60s, loving his mother’s noodle pudding of cottage cheese, Cheddar, sour cream and elbow macaroni. He remembers being excited to eat kugel at a friend’s house, only to discover that it was sweet, with cinnamon and raisins.

“People use food as they use grammar,” he said, “a vocabulary to define themselves in class and tribal identity. For me, savory noodle pudding was a defining feature of my family’s culture. The sweet noodle pudding felt foreign.”

My mother liked the kugel I served this summer enough to ask for a second helping. But she had advice for me, as only a mother does.

“Put in more Tabasco and sharper onions,” she said. “The dish needs to be spicier.”